Abstract
We explore employment of the Hebrew construction ('ani) lo yode'a / lo yoda'at (lit ‘[I] not m/f-sg.know’), roughly equivalent to English ‘I don’t know’, by callers and hosts in 80 interactions on Israeli political radio phone-in programs, as compared with its functions in casual conversation. Five uses were attested in the corpus of radio phone-ins and correlated with the syntactic form of complementation (if available) for each token of the construction: (i) expressing literal lack of knowledge; (ii) expressing epistemic stance of uncertainty / hedging; (iii) gaining cognitive processing time in the midst of self-repair; (iv) expressing affective stance of contempt or criticism; and (v) avoidance strategies. While most of these uses are common to both genres, some are unattested in casual conversation. By exploring the functions of the ('ani) lo yode'a / lo yoda'at construction and their distribution according to institutional role, the study (i) sheds further light on the use of the construction and its evolvement through use; and (ii) shows how hosts and callers exploit this specific construction in ways that establish the Israeli political radio phone-in institutional genre.
About the authors
Yael Maschler is Professor of General and Hebrew Linguistics at the University of Haifa, Israel. Specializing in Discourse and Grammar and in Interactional Linguistics, her research explores the crystallization of grammatical structure from interaction. She is the author of Metalanguage in interaction: Hebrew discourse markers (2009, John Benjamins). She is currently principal investigator of the project “The emergent grammar of clause-combining from a cross-linguistic perspective – a contribution to pragmatic typology” funded by the Israel Science Foundation.
Gonen Dori-Hacohen (Ph.D. 2009, University of Haifa, Israel) is Associate Professor at the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is a discourse analyst, studying interactions in the media and in mundane situations, focusing on the intersection of interaction, culture, politics and the media.
Acknowledgements
Yael Maschler would like to acknowledge Grant no. 887/12 from the Israel Science Foundation and a Visiting Professorship at the Finnish Center of Excellence in Research on Intersubjectivity in Interaction at the Department of Finnish, Finno-Ugrian, and Scandinavian Studies, University of Helsinki during January and February 2016, which have both enabled completion of this study. The paper was presented at the International Conference on Conversation Analysis (ICCA 2014) at UCLA.
Gonen Dori-Hacohen would like to thank the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University and the Lady Davis Fellowship for the visiting professor fellowship during his sabbatical from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst during 2018.
Appendix: Transcription conventions
Each line denotes an intonation unit (Chafe 1994) followed by a (broad) gloss. Only when the gloss is not close enough to an English utterance, it is followed by a (functional) translation. Tokens of loydea/loydat are given in boldface and their object complements (if available) are underlined. Transcription basically follows Chafe (1994), as sometimes adapted by Du Bois (forthcoming) and adjusted for Hebrew:
… | half-second pause (each extra dot=another half a second) |
| .. | perceptible pause of less than half a second |
(3.56) | measured pause of 3.56 seconds |
intonation unit, | continuing intonation (“more to come”) |
intonation unit. | sentence-final falling intonation |
intonation unit? | sentence-final “appeal intonation” |
intonation unit?, | “continuing appeal” intonation (Du Bois forthcoming) |
intonation unit! | sentence final exclamatory intonation |
ø | lack of punctuation at end of line – a fragmentary intonation unit |
| -- | elongation of preceding vowel |
@ | one burst of laughter |
´ | primary stress of intonation unit |
[ | Square bracket to the left of two consecutive lines indicates beginning of overlapping speech, two speakers talking at once, alignment such that the right of the top line is placed over the left of the bottom line indicates latching, no interturn pause. |
pp | pianissimo (spoken very softly) |
ff | fortissimo (spoken very loudly) |
/??????/ | transcription impossible |
/within slashes/ | uncertain transcription |
{in curly brackets} | transcriber’s comments |
' | Uninverted quotation mark in the middle of a transliterated word indicates the glottal stop phoneme. |
’ | Inverted quotation mark in the middle of a transliterated word indicates an elided form (e.g. ts’xa instead of tsrixa [‘needs’, f, sg]). |
m | masculine |
f | feminine |
sg | singular |
pl | plural |
acc | accusative marker |
subj | subject |
neg | negation |
pred | predicate |
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